moving fog clouds in FCP

[Chris Poisson]

Oscar,

The Boris Clouds filter is good, but it ain’t cheap. There’s some smoke and mist in the stock effects inside Motion, with which you can also make your own with particle generators.

Have a wonderful day.

[John Pale]

Motion has some content that might do the trick for you

[Oscar Brightman]

Thanks, Chris and John. I’m a motion newbie but I’ll check it out. I guess I’ll need to export it rather than work in FCP. I just heard about “vapor” from digieffects which does water effects – clouds, fog, etc.. It’s only $100 and it sounds like I can work in FCP with it. Has anyone used it? Thanks again.

https://www.digieffects.com/products/Vapor.html

[Tom Matthies]

Have you tried to use FCP’s “built-in” clouds?
Go to the generators tab and look at Render>clouds.
Might work for you and it’s free.
Tom

[Oscar Brightman]

Dear Tom,
That’s great! I had no idea that Final Cut had those “cloud” effects built in. I’m going for a bit of a campy feel so even if it is less than photo-perfect it should work great for my project. Thanks again…

That being said, I just tried it and it appears my system graphics card can’t handle the effect. I thought I had a pretty robust system (it’s a Quad core 2.66) but I get the message “The effect “clouds” cannot be rendered in a sequence of this size with the current graphics card.”

My sequence is a 1920 x 1080 HDTV1080i 16:9 Apple ProRes 23.98. It’s footage I shot in Super-16 film then telecined to HDCAM then digitized to ProRes.

Any idea of a workaround or is it already time to upgrade my graphics card?
System is not yet a year old but already feels obsolete working with effects in HD/ProRes! I’ve seen this same message with the “bloom” and “earthquake” f/x by the way.

Here’s my system:

GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
2 Dual-Core Intel Xeons(QUAD Core)
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
3 GB RAM

FCP STUDIO 2
MAC OSX 10.5

Thanks to Tom and any others who want to chime in.
best,
Oscar